Visualizing the Olympics with Power View in Excel 2013: Day 1

With the Olympics kicking off over the weekend, I thought it would be fun to run a series of blog posts on how you can visualize data from the Olympics using the Excel 2013 Consumer Preview and Power View. The approach of this project is simple. Each day, for as long as the Olympics are running in London, I’ll highlight one or two features in Power View and how you can use them to build interactive reports. Along the way, we’ll also spend time in PowerPivot in Excel as well to demonstrate some of the new features that are part of the Consumer Preview.

For starters, the first thing you will need is the Office 2013 Consumer Preview which you can download at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en. The preview is completely free and you can install it side by side with your existing Office installation. As we work through the solution over the next few weeks, I’ll post each day’s workbook here in a SkyDrive folder called Power View Olympics. I’ll also include a short video that demonstrates the day’s solution as well.

Alright, let’s get started. For this first example, we are going to start with the list of the 10,960 athletes that are participating in the Olympics and create a map that displays the count of athletes from each country. It’s in a table in Excel.

Next, select any cell in the table and then go to the ribbon and choose the option to insert a Power View report.

This will create a Power View sheet in Excel that contains a copy of the table.

If you are interested in looking at some of the athletes and where they are from you can sort the data using the column header text or filter out rows using the filter pane to the right. However, in our case we are going to create a map, so we will delete this table and leave ourselves with a blank canvas. Let’s also add a title to the top of the report.

From the field list now, simply expand the Athletes entity and select country. Your report should now look like this.

To create a map, simply go to the ribbon and choose the Map option from the Switch Visualization Ribbon chunk.

When you choose this option the list of countries will turn into a map with bubbles that are all of the same size as shown below.

A couple of things to note about the map. The first is that you must be online and have connectivity to Bing in order to use the feature. Both the background for the map and the individual points on the map are determined by passing your data over a secure web connection to Bing, where Bing geocodes the data and then returns it back to Excel.

Look at that. We are almost done. To show the count of athletes in each country, we simply just need to drag the “Name” field from the field list down to the Size drop zone in the field well and your map will look like this.

And with that, we have created our first map for the Olympics. While you are here you can zoom in and pan around on the map as well as hover over the data points to see the values for each country.

Thanks for following along with this first post. While there is a lot more functionality available in the map, much of it we will likely cover in future posts, I thought it would be fun to start with a simple exercise for the first post to show you how easy it can be to build a map in Excel 2013 with Power View.